Moodle plugins directory: Fordson

The Fordson theme is focused on students going from login to learning, with features that help teachers build better courses and students engage with content. Your school is unique and Fordson provides impressive customizations for a professional and modern learning platform.
Try out Fordson and show some love by clicking "favourite" ( ♥ ) !

New layout and style choosers allow you to mix and match elements of the page to create over 100 unique style/page combinations. Choose a Page Layout, Section Style, Course Listing Style, Blocks Location, and a Style Preset.

Blocks can be shown 2 ways: Boost default sidebar or new Fordson 3 column. The Fordson 3 column layout is designed as a block panel which can be shown or hidden with the click of a button in the upper right of the course title area.

Beautiful Design, Organization Branding, & Marketing

Fordson extends the core Boost theme to provide (currently) 9 unique style presets, customized color choosers, enhanced user interactions, improved navigation, and branding opportunities within the theme. Style presets allow you to change the layout and look of your site by simply choosing a new preset. Depending on your needs, Fordson delivers a variety of style presets from bland to grand! Once you choose the right preset you can continue to customize your site with color choosers, logos, social media links, and other organization branding features. We realize in addition to learning there also needs to be a method to communicate and market, so we also provide areas within the layout that accomplish this in a way that minimizes distractions.

Focused on What Matters

We are focused on the process of getting a student to go from login to learning as efficiently as possible. Once in a course, we utilize a variety of techniques to help students engage with the content and organize the page in a way that helps promote learning. We accomplish this by listening to our teachers and students for ways to improve that experience. When we extend Moodle functionality, we try to stay as close to core Boost as possible. Fordson delivers impressive features such as an innovative Course Management dashboard for teachers and little features like a course editing button that is always visible and “location aware” to speed up building a course. The learning content is most important and Fordson utilizes space, color, images, icons, and other elements to help guide students through a course. Spend more time engaged in learning and less time clicking buttons. Fordson enhances the user experience for both students and teachers by combining clean and efficient design with innovative user features not found in other themes. From login to learning we are focused on making Moodle better for students and teachers.

Thoughtful and Purposeful Development

Development of the Fordson theme is often guided by community, teacher, and student feedback. We listen to suggestions that match our desire to provide the best experience from login to learning. The Fordson theme shines when you are looking for the the following:

A theme that organizes Moodle’s navigation and enhances it to improve the user experience.

A theme that is focused on going from login to learning and getting out of the way of your teachers and students.

Improved navigation that helps make sense of course management for teachers and students get into courses faster

Designed and refined with community and teacher input based on their needs

Great Moodle.org discussion on the top tech tools for building a learning platform. See Moodle and the Fordson theme in action at the center of a robust and fully featured learning platform.

YouTube Channel with all kinds of videos documenting theme development and features

A re-imagined course management panel

Everything a teacher needs to manage their online classroom is only a click away from anywhere within their course.

Keep students informed with progress reports and a course dashboard

Unique to Fordson is a student dashboard which displays important course information such as grades, completion progress, and teacher contact details. Let students see individual topic completion status so they know which course topics they still have work to do.

Feature the most effective activity modules first

Make sure teachers see and use the modules your organization feels are most important. Customize the activity and resource modules with the ability to feature modules, hide modules and even control the ordering of the modules.

One place to look for all major navigation and functionality - Top Navigation Bar

Fordson took many of the navigational elements found throughout the default layout and moved everything into the very top navigation bar so that a user has one place to look for buttons and tools within a course.

No more getting lost trying to search and find a course. Our Easy Enrollment plugin is deeply integrated with the Fordson theme and makes enrollment a super simple process. The enrollment plugin assigns a 6 digit code to every course and group in your entire site. Pass out the codes to students and they can instantly enroll directly from the site homepage. Don’t worry. If you do not want to use this enrollment plugin you do not need to do so. Fordson only displays the enrollment form if it detects that the plugin is activated on your site.

New Way to Show Blocks with a 3 column panel

Fordson allows you to choose between the default Boost sidebar or our new innovative block panel which is displayed with the click of a button or out of the way when students are learning.

We made it possible to switch how courses in your site are displayed when viewing the course categories. Pick from 4 different layouts to further customize the look and feel of your Moodle site using Fordson.

Easy Enrollment Add-On

Install the Easy Enrollment add-on and Fordson will display a new enrollment form on the homepage. This new form will allow a student to enter a 6 digit code and instantly be enrolled into the corresponding course or group within the course. This allows a student to go from the homepage to a course in seconds! It will even generate and read QR Codes for enrolling elementary kids by simple waving a paper in front of the computer.

Special Thanks

Elements and certain functionality of Fordson would not be possible without the following users and plugins:

@srinivas We could add this to a list of things to try out. Our main focus right now is polishing some issues with the current theme, releasing our secure browser chromebook App, and looking at possibly a new course format if time allows.

After upgrading from 3.5 to 3.5.1+ site works fine except for issue of not being able to make some configuration changes under site administration.
For example, I'm not able to save changes that I make to my theme settings like color and Menus. After clicking "Save Changes" The page would simply reload without the changes being applied. This happens when trying to make changes to many of the settings under site administration.

It seems to be happening even if I try some of the administrative changes too.
This is really weird because if i try making changes to the site using this https://mysite/admin/settings.php?section=themesettingfordson it doesn't work. However if I try here https://mysite/admin/category.php?category=themes the same changes are applied without any issues.
PS I did try re-installation and I'm getting the same results.
Thanks again for your assistance.

I figured out where the issue was.
In the process of upgrading to the new version I copied the entire "theme" folder from the old site rather than just copying "My Theme".
So I'm guessing some of the new files that were needed for the "Boost" theme to function efficiently in the upgraded Moodle version weren't present in the old version.
Thanks a million for the assistance.

Dennie, the theme forum is the best place to post questions. I do look and monitor for questions related to fordson there. Please use the forums for any further help with the fordson theme. There are also more people who might be able to answer your questions there as well. https://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=46

I am trying to configure a plugin that has a custom course admin menu item in it (Course Recompletion: https://moodle.org/plugins/local_recompletion). Since Fordson reorganizes how these links are displayed, the entry point to the settings for the plugin never appear, as it appears the links are hard-coded, rather than using the core methods to obtain. Is it possible to have the links dynamically loaded from the db?

David,
No. It isn't possible out of the box. In order to break the way Moodle organized the Course Admin links we had to build the menu via the theme. If you are a coder it would be quite easy to add. The function is called teacherdash and is on line 977 of core_renderer.php. That would generate and display the link from there.
If we would have left it to the core menu renderer then all the links would all be organized the default way which made no sense to our users. We like them grouped the way we have them.

Zeid, Yes. In order for some of the crowded real-estate at the top of the page we hid those icons. You can simply remove that or override it with CSS to bring them back. We will not be doing so in the theme as we would prefer our students using mobile use the Moodle App.